Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Resident Fellowship Years: 2024-2025

Faculty Profile: Hussam Mahmoud

Research Focus: The COVID-19 pandemic was unique not only in its duration and intensity, but also for the public response in terms of misinformation and distrust. In this project, Mahmoud will augment traditional community resilience models with cognitive theories to explore how public perception impacts community resilience. Mahmoud aims to create new knowledge on how cognitive theories (CT) from the field of human behavior and visualizations (HBV) can be used to reduce the impact of pandemics on societies. This Resident Fellow will utilize their previous experience in healthcare resilience under natural disasters to explore how misinformation affects (and potentially undermines) the resilience of communities subjected to epidemics.